are." He was, as we are aware, no court painter,
and the cheerful colours certainly do not predominate. The noblesse for
all their exclusiveness cannot escape his censure. He can see that they
are poor (they are unable to boast more than two coaches among their
whole number), and he feels sure that they are depraved. He attributes
both vices unhesitatingly to their idleness and to their religion. In
their singularly unemotional and coolly comparative outlook upon
religion, how infinitely nearer were Fielding and Smollett than their
greatest successors, Dickens and Thackeray, to the modern critic who
observes that there is "at present not a single credible established
religion in existence." To Smollett Catholicism conjures up nothing so
vividly as the mask of comedy, while his native Calvinism stands for
the corresponding mask of tragedy. [Walpole's dictum that Life was a
comedy to those who think, a tragedy for those who feel, was of later
date than this excellent mot of Smollett's.] Religion in the sunny
spaces of the South is a "never-failing fund of pastime." The mass (of
which he tells a story that reminds us of Lever's Micky Free) is just a
mechanism invented by clever rogues for an elaborate system of petty
larceny. And what a ferocious vein of cynicism underlies his strictures
upon the perverted gallantry of the Mariolaters at Florence, or those
on the two old Catholics rubbing their ancient gums against St. Peter's
toe for toothache at Rome. The recurring emblems of crosses and gibbets
simply shock him as mementoes of the Bagne.

At Rome he compares a presentment of St. Laurence to "a barbecued pig."
"What a pity it is," he complains, "that the labours of painting should
have been employed on such shocking objects of the martyrology,"
floggings, nailings, and unnailings... "Peter writhing on the cross,
Stephen battered with stones, Sebastian stuck full of arrows,
Bartholomew flayed alive," and so on. His remarks upon the famous Pieta
of Michael Angelo are frank to the point of brutality. The right of
sanctuary and its "infamous prerogative," unheard of in England since
the days of Henry VII., were still capable of affording a lesson to the
Scot abroad. "I saw a fellow who had three days before murdered his
wife in the last month of pregnancy, taking the air with great
composure and serenity, on the steps of a church in Florence."
Smollett, it is clear, for all his philosophy, was no degenerate
representative o